VDH:
World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it?
The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Communist Soviet Union all wanted to attack their neighbors.
Yet World War II could have been prevented had Western Europe united to deter Germany. Instead, France, Britain, and the smaller European democracies appeased Hitler.
The United States turned isolationist. The Soviet Union collaborated with the Third Reich. And Italy and Japan eventually joined it.
The 1930s saw rampant anti-Semitism. Jews were blamed in fascist countries for the economic downturn. They were scapegoated in democracies for stirring up the fascists. The only safe havens for Jews from Europe were Jewish-settled Palestine and the United States.
Does all this sound depressingly familiar?
The aftershocks of the global financial meltdown of 2008 still paralyze the European Union while prompting all sorts of popular extremist movements and opportunistic terrorists.
After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, America has turned inward. The Depression and the lingering unhappiness over World War I did the same to Americans in the 1930s.
Premodern monsters are on the move. The Islamic State is carving up Syria and Iraq to fashion a fascist caliphate.
Vladimir Putin gobbles up his neighbors in Ossetia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine, in crude imitation of the way Germany once swallowed Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
Theocratic Iran is turning Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon into a new Iranian version of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Western response to all this? Likewise, similar to the 1930s.
The NATO allies are terrified that Putin will next attack the NATO-member Baltic states — and that their own paralysis will mean the embarrassing end of the once-noble alliance.
The United States has now fled from four Middle Eastern countries. It forfeited its post-surge victory in Iraq. It was chased out of Libya after the killings of Americans in Benghazi. American red lines quickly turned pink in Syria. U.S. Marines just laid down their weapons and flew out of the closed American embassy in Yemen.
America has convinced its European partners to drop tough sanctions against Iran. In the manner of the Allies in 1938 at Munich, they prefer instead to charm Iran, in hopes it will stop making a nuclear bomb.
The Islamic State has used almost a year of unchallenged aggression to remake the map of the Middle East. President Obama had variously dismissed it as a jayvee team or merely akin to the problems that big-city mayors face.
Europeans pay out millions to ransom their citizens from radical Islamic hostage-beheaders. Americans handed over terrorist kingpins to get back a likely Army deserter.
Then we come to the return of the Jewish question. Seventy years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews are once again leaving France. They have learned that weak governments either will not or cannot protect them from Islamic terrorists.
Why do these nations follow the model created by Hitler in the ’30’s? Because it works and they face the same conditions Hitler faced; people who will do whatever it takes to avoid war (not knowing they are walking right into one).
What has caused the only example of a despot seeing the writing on the wall and backing down? Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the execution of Hussein. (also remember how Gadhafi acted before the UN after Obama was elected).
One has to wonder why the left only follows the examples that have been proven to fail.
Let us not forget another of Hitler’s motivations….
An effective way to distract your citizens from their problems- in Hitler’s case, economic- (huh- deja vu indeed) is to start a war.
That gets your citizens pulling together in patriotic fervor, and allows your government to do some horrific things that your citizens would never allow save the us-versus-them mentality of wartime.
And if you can find a minority scapegoat that no one will sympathize with, it makes things even easier.
Hitler had the jews, Russia and the Islamists have… Oh, never mind. Too easy.
But on that note, I have to wonder if the racial tension that we are getting so sick of has a long-term purpose in the plans of our politicians? They are, after all, further marginalizing blacks with amnesty.
Could they be creating a handy scapegoat to distract us from things that the pols won’t want us to notice?
This is so interesting.
@Petercat: Hitler had Germany so deep in debt that even had they not lost the war, they would have gone bankrupt (even more deja vu).
The harsh penalties placed on the German after WWI also contributed to support for Hitler.
Well, President Trump delayed it for four years, but now we’re back on track.
With a vengeance.